And I'm in (Forthcoming) Print Again!

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My pal, Jeffrey Ford, has just released the table of contents for Jonathan Strahan's anthology Eclipse (number) Four.  How he got it, I don't know.  But it was picked up by SF Signal, so it's not exactly a secret anymore.

And here it is:

Introduction, Jonathan Strahan

“Slow as a Bullet”, Andy Duncan

“Tidal Forces”, Caitlin R. Kiernan

“The Beancounter’s Cat”, Damien Broderick

“Story Kit”, Kij Johnson

“The Man in Grey”, Michael Swanwick

“Old Habits”, Nalo Hopkinson

“The Vicar of Mars”, Gwyneth Jones

“Fields of Gold”, Rachel Swirsky

“Thought Experiment”, Eileen Gunn

“The Double of My Double Is Not My Double”, Jeffrey Ford

“Nine Muses”, Emma Bull

“Dying Young”, Peter M Ball

“The Panda Coin”, Jo Walton

“Tourists”, James Patrick Kelly

That's one damn fine lineup.  But of all the stories in the anthology, "The Man in Grey" is best.  Because I wrote it.

The other authors may, of course, disagree.

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Working Away on "The Dala Horse"

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Friday!?  How the heck did it get to be Friday already?

I seem to have gotten into the rhythm of blogging every weekday . . .  Which rhythm ran splat into this past week.  For which I apologize.  What happened was that a couple of days ago I picked up a story I've been working on shortly after I was guest of honor at Swecon, let's see now, over ten years ago.  (And while we're at it, how the heck did it get to be 2011 already?)

The germ of the story comes from a pub meeting that Marianne and I attended a few days after the convention.  Swedish pub meetings are intensely enjoyable things, as it turns out, but that's beside the point.  I was drinking a gröna hissen and, appropriate to some conversational point or other, I pulled a small red dala horse which I'd bought that day out of my pocket.  There was an awkward silence and then somebody said, "My parents have a couple of those."

Dala horses are little wooden carvings, very simply, painted bright colors with a harness of flowers.  They're very Swedish.  And, as I learned, they are not at all cool.

One of the con people told me that when Ursula K. Le Guin learned there wasn't a story to go with the dala horse, she wrote one herself.  So, on the spot, I resolved that I could do not less.

Sometime later, I wrote:

 Something terrible had happened.  Linnea did not know what it was.  But her father had looked pale and worried, and her mother had told her, very fiercely, "Be brave!" and now she had to leave, and it was all the result of that terrible thing.

Slowly, terribly slowly, the story inched its way forward.  And then, last Friday, I picked it up and began writing.  I believe now I'm within a few days of finishing it.  So that's what I've been up to and why I haven't been blogging as much as usual.


Above:  I'm in print again!  In Poland.  My story Prawdziwy puls mazyny is in this translation of Mike Ashley's Mammoth Book of Science Fiction 2.  So I am happy, and hope the same for you.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 23

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A certain junior member of this household was called up for jury duty.  A year later, while cleaning, I lifted a rug and discovered that he hadn't bothered to cash the nine dollar check they gave him.  So I pasted it in my notebook and drew a dragon's head over it.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 21

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Sadness rules the world.  The first time ever I found myself in New York City as an adult, I found myself cold and walking down the city streets, staring up at the hundreds of lighted windows above me and thinking that if you could lift the buildings and shake them, all the pain in the world would sift out.  The older you are, the more pain shows on your face.  When an old man smiles, it's all the sweeter for the melancholy beneath.

Today is the new yesterday.  Tuesday is the new tomorrow.

That's obviously first draft.  But since I had no publishable use for it, I didn't bother to rewrite it.  Every word is true.  That was an important moment for me.

With genetic engineering, sharks can not only walk on land, but go door to door selling cosmetics or encyclopedias.

Light though it is, the above entry shows one of the inherent dangers of writing science fiction.  It's perilously easy to find yourself writing in the past.  I can't remember the last time a door-to-door salesman came by.

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The Sleep of Reason Revisited

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Monday, Marianne and I jaunted up to the Big Apple to visit my friend and sometime-publisher Henry Wessells, who works at that renowned occasion of sin, James Cummins, Bookseller.  (Click here to begin browsing and subsequently resolve to become so very rich that you can put the establishment on speed-dial.)

There are a lot of items there worthy of admiration.  (I particularly liked the unique book which Bill Mauldin had created by making erotic drawings in a collection of poetry, and three newly-discovered letters by Mervyn Peake.)  But what inspired out trip was a chance to see a bound set of first editions of all eighty etchings in Goya's Los Caprichos.

I didn't ask and so I can't even imagine how much such a thing cost (Goya himself only sold 27 sets before the series got him in such hot water that the king had to bail him out by buying all the remaining etchings and the plates as well).  But whoever winds up buying it will get his or her money's worth.

The first prints are always the cleanest, of course, and most of the reproductions you've seen are based on later editions.  (The last of which was in the twentieth century!)  Plus, there's details lost in even the finest reproductions.  So it was a treat to be able to turn the pages by hand -- such good paper! -- and pore over the fine work that Goya did.

Years ago, I created a series of flash fiction, one for each plate, for Eileen Gunn's late and lamented online SF e-zine The Infinite Matrix.  It was a revelation to lean close to the real thing and see all the fine detail I'd missed out on, working from a paperback.  In several of the plates, what looks like murky shadow revealed itself to be a shadowy, supernatural figure, possibly death, bending low over a cluster of oblivious fools and scoundrels.  If only I'd seen him then, I'd've worked him into the series.

It was a delightful experience,   Those who haven't seen The Sleep of Reason, can find it here.


Above:  Prick the Donkey at play.  Prick started out as a parody of a certain Republican president and quickly became the most lovable character in the series.  Go figure.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 20

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Ah!  Remember what I said about my notebooks being a cruel practical joke?  Well, what I did here was to tear a picture from a magazine, paste it onto the page, and then compose extempore a very short story upon it.  It's an exercise in imagination and discipline.  As I recall it, the story worked.

But if the story worked, then why should I?  I look at the thing and my heart shrinks from the job.  It would be a lot of labor to decipher it.  So I shan't.

Feel free to do so yourself, though, if that's the way your inclinations bend.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 19

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November 17, 2008

First a list of things to do and then . . .

I remember this.  I must have been reading something about the Dadaists because I determined to write extempore a nonsense poem in the form of a list.  As best I can reconstruct it:

1)  sun cros[s?]

2) [two arches]

3)  urh green angel

4)  orc

5)  [three arches] /"Hush"

6)  [picture of a house]

7)  sorrow in chains

8)  pleasant graveyard

9)  dark angel

10)  fireplace

11)  other dark angel

12)  bright angel

There never was any chance that something derived from this would get published.  I did it for the pleasure of the art and for what I might learn from it alone.

In item 7, "urh" might be the word "orc" crossed out so it could be placed one item deeper in the list.

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